> Due to technological advances, this argument is rapidly losing
> weight. The two primary changes are: Servers are getting faster
> and faster, and thus the power necessary to make this kind of
There are still large parts of the world where bandwidth is a real issue.
In many countries people are configuring caches to the point where there
are real privacy breaches because of excessive use of dynamically generated
pages by web sites (one legitimate reason for defeating caching is that
data is private).
Also, even when accessing over the permanent, 128k link from the office,
I find that a large proportion of sites that use 100% dynamic HTML
tend to shoot themselves in the foot as they do not have the bandwidth
to support that mode of operation. This is not in the USA, but it
is in a relatively high tech country.
Whilst reducing bandwidth costs may help organisations with lots of money
to go 100% server side dynamic. It also helps people on small budgets
to just get on the web. Often there is a premium charge associated with
generating dynamic content, and severe daily download limits for people
who are really cost limited.
Dynamic content also frustrates offline reading (reducing costs were
calls are metered (and reducing security risk exposure)).
(The general trend with bandwidth is always to use slightly more of it
than is really available!)